Please visit the accompanying website: Life on Nu Phoenicis IV, the planet Furaha.
This blog is about speculative biology. Recurrent themes are biomechanics, the works of other world builders, and, of course, the planet Furaha.

Saturday, 23 October 2010

The Epona Project was, or perhaps is, probably the first serious attempt to build an fictional biosphere from scratch. There is still a website, definitely worth watching. Admittedly, the project has stopped in the sense that no new life forms have been developed for a long time, nor is that likely to happen. But the website is being added to, and I return to it from time to time. The last blog entry on Epona is to be found here, while another one that shows the same scene as is shown in the film below is right here. This time, I used Vue Infinite (version 7.5) to produce a film of almost one minute duration.

How does this work? Well, first of all, there were the life forms to consider. Steven Hanly had modelled them in the past, and it proved possible to port some of his models into the Vue environment. The 'uther' you see flying in the scene is entirely Stephen's doing. The plants could not be used directly, as present-day computer imagery requires more detail than was available when he first designed the models. They were therefore designed anew, using XFrog for the large leaves of the pagoda trees and for all small plants. The stems of the large pagoda tress were done in Vue Infinite. The trees were assembled in Vue, and Vue's 'ecosystem' feature was used to create a terrain with a stream running through it. Then just imagine that a 5-second fragment of film may need some 34 hours to render.

After that, a bit of sound was added, a process I have hardly any experience with. I hope the result is not too jarring.

Anyway, there we are: perhaps the film is about a robot drone taking a look on an Eponan archipelago, covered by a pagoda forest. There is a larger version on YouTube. The original film on my computer is much better; I wish I knew more about optimising quality while compressing a video...

Friday, 8 October 2010

In my last post I played with some concepts about leg design, mostly concerning whether it is better to have sprawling legs or ones that function as pillars. It turned out that there is no answer that is always correct: for large animals pillars help minimise energy expenditure in the form of muscle power, and for small animals sprawling legs provide protection against wind forces, something that gets more consequential the smaller you get. Perhaps wind is also one of the reasons why small arthropods are so good at gripping surfaces tightly: I had thought that that was mainly a neat feature to cling to vertical surfaces or even to land on a ceiling, but perhaps simply keeping put where you are if there is a strong wind weighs in too. What do insects do when there is a real gale out there? Does anyone know?

There are still enough problems to play with. I took the Disneius species that had just evolved last time and decided to take its legs one step further, i.e., I tried to simplify their design some more. The reasoning was that legs largely have to move in the body direction, rendering movements in other directions less important. The result is Disneius mechanicus:

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

And here it is. This has taken the idea to an ultimate form: the joints in its legs rotate purely in forwards and backwards directions. Note that this would not work in real life, as the animal would not be able to turn. In real life you would want to make the feet and at least one joint higher up more adaptable.

The legs are built in a zigzag way, like those of its predecessors. Last time I discussed that avoiding bending ‘moments’ becomes easier the nearer the joints are near the centre of gravity. Mind you, zigzagging legs in which the joints zigzag inside and outside are not necessarily worse than ones that do their zigzagging forwards and backwards. The usual explanation for the anatomy of mammal legs is that ‘vertical’ is better, but just suppose you take one of D. mechanicus’ legs and turn it by 90 degrees. If its foot was directly underneath the hip joint to start with, the rotation will not change that. The joint angles do not change either. All this leads me to conclude that ‘verticality’ in limbs depends more on having straight legs than on the direction the joints zigzag in. Legs that predominantly move forward and backwards have the advantage of allowing simpler joints, and simpler joints may allow less muscle strength to control their position: a good thing. I would expect large animals with highly evolved legs to adopt forwards and backwards bending as well. A bit boring, but that is what you get with universal laws of nature.

Luckily there are enough items left that might make alien animals more alien-looking. As you can see, the fore and aft legs of D. mechanicus are exactly alike. This is not what mammal legs look like. From a mechanical point of view fore and aft leg tend to have different effects, with aft legs providing more propulsive force than front ones. Is that also the reason why mammal knees point forwards and their elbows backwards? It seems as if, starting with a newt, its upper arms were rotated backwards and its thighs forwards to turn it into a mammal with fore-aft moving legs.

Click to enlarge

Here is a picture from this site that explains just that phenomenon. It explains why the bones in the forearm are crossed while those in the leg are not. But that is just one way to look at things. In the same newt-to-mammal trip, a third large movable segment was added to the newt's two. In the front leg the shoulder blade turned into a movable segment, and in the hind leg foot bones were recruited. If you look at the result from a functional point of view, the first large movable segment is the shoulder blade in the front limb and the thigh bone in the hind limb. Both point forwards, and from that the other segments zig backwards and then forwards. That is what D. mechanicus looks like! Based on this functional view, I feel that identical front and hind legs are theoretically quite possible. Prolonged specialisation for braking and weight carrying (front legs) and propulsion (hind legs) might change some aspects, but I see no need to ‘prescribe’ the typical mammal pattern as the only feasible one.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

So here is a variant (the left one) in which the upper segments starts the zigzag by pointing backwards, not forwards, as in the righthand side one. Can this work? At present I see no reason why not. Perhaps I should do some animation studies to see if any big problems come up. But if there are none, an animal could have front legs that start with a zig and hind legs that start with a zag, or vice versa. They are in the background of the image above, but a closer look follows.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

And here they are: we could make up interesting leg formulae, like ‘zigzig’for an animal in which both front and hind legs start with a forwards zig (and in which the other segments follow the lead of the first segment). ‘Zagzig’ denotes an animal with a front leg starting with a backwards zag while the hind leg starts forwards. You can think of what a ‘zigzagzig’ means for yourselves.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Just for fun here is a herd of the beasties. How many zigzags should there be? I do not know. If there is a proper foot, in which many segments touch the floor, I would expect all of them to bend backwards to promote ‘rolling’ over the ground. If just one segment touches the ground, as in hoofed mammals, I have no idea. But the majority of long segments will likely zigzag.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is an animal with more zigzags, along with an ancestor. The giraffomorph looks weak to me. There must be an optimum number of segments to achieve good manoeuvrability and/or good speed, but I do not dare speculate on that, or at least not now. I also do not know why the scapula in mammals is not connected by joints to the vertebral column, in contrast to the hind legs. Does it have to do with shock absorption versus propulsion? Perhaps those are good subjects for later posts.